Sunday was spent driving, boating and walking onto a privately-owned island that few have ever explored. The Nature Conservancy of Washington guided it’s members out to Yellow Island, a small islet southwest of Orcas Island. Leaving Anacortes on a chartered boat, we cut over the calm chilled green waters of a north Puget Sound swirling under sharp blue skies. With Mt. Baker and the Cascades brooding with white summits, the twin 80hp engines sped us into the passages where ferries filled with tourists criss-crossed through the San Juan Islands.

Yellow Island is an 11-acre landmass with over 50 wild flowers bursting in spring air. Once we arrived on its pebbly shores, hummingbirds darted from blossom to blossom across the ancient prairie land. Before the arrival of Europeans, indigenous peoples settled the island and frequently burned the landscape to sustain its prairie land. Few of the original burn scars can be found on the oldest tree trunks. In 1979 the island was purchased by The Nature Conservancy and thus preserved as part of Washington State’s pristine environmental heritage.

In order to prosper, every living creature requires clean air, clean water and abundant food. For ocean-thriving mollusks, clean seawater is a must. In December 2011, Washington State Governor Christine Gregoire formed a Blue Ribbon Panel. Their purpose: to investigate and study a new threat to Pacific Northwest waters. They were putting Ocean Acidification (OA) under the microscope.

What is occurring is evidence of our Industrial Period 100 years prior as heavy carbon dioxide (CO2) elements now begin surfacing in the shallow waters of the Puget Sound. As the spring and fall seasons of the Pacific Northwest bring strong northwesterly winds, currents in the Pacific Ocean stir up these century-old pollutants, pushing them upwards and east into the estuaries. These so-called up-wellings decrease pH levels, causing normal numbers of 8.25 to sink lower into the acidic levels of 8.14 (The pH scale is representative of aqueous solutions from zero to fourteen; where zero characterizes hydrochloric acid or battery acid, and fourteen is sodium hydroxide, better known as bleach). Acid is a solvent. It dissolves what it comes in contact with. Add acidic waters to oyster seed and you find its ingredients eating away at the calcium carbonate that makes up the mollusk’s shell.

Taylor Shellfish Farms is the first to experience this threat. They are attracting globe attention to what is occurring within their hatcheries and throughout their farms. They rely on clean healthy water for larvae seed to develop, but ocean acidification is effecting the development of these mollusks, prohibiting full and consistent growth of their calcium carbonate shells. What is the future of the mollusk culture if we continue burning fossil fuels and causing the climate to warm-up at faster then expected rate? Our industrial state affects more then just our air quality.

To see Part II of the multimedia project Ocean Acidification and our Oyster Culture, please click here

As I continue to drive out into the Olympic Peninsula, camera bags full and surf gear packed, I slowly observe the culture of a timber industry unfolding before my eyes. It is a people’s livelihood, their subsistence within the forest, bringing shelters over families heads and food to their hungry tables. And for the blue collar, it is not a wealthy industry. They are the cutters, sawers, operators, drivers and haulers of a civilization taking over the wild places.

With video files and the numerous still images of the cold cloudy spring passing over the Northwest wilderness, this project is evolving into an unbiased perspective of Man vs. Nature, and how the two can equally subsist; prosper side by side and thrive within one another.

Below is the second essay of imagery and visual thoughts from a story of wood deep within the Olympic Peninsula.

Wood; a precious commodity. Cut, sawed, shaped, nailed, lacquered, stained. Occasionally it’s replanted, and years later, generations gone, money is made again. Wood is money. The forests are for sale, for their resources, for their lands, for their habitat. The following images are the start of a multimedia project telling the tale of wood, from origin to combustion, and the phases of transition in-between. How does it effect us? How does it feed us? How is the life under our feet and that above our heads impacted today, tomorrow and those generations ahead?

Lo-key is the opposite of hi-key. The absence of light and a play on dark tones defines the dramatic lo-key photograph. Incorporate a good use of positive and negative values, and a narrative should unfold between your subject and the audience. Here I photographed my subject in character as a Shaman. He’s preparing for a ceremony with wild turkey heads using a large rusty cleaver in silhouette. He painted himself a sooty black with a singular white stripe running from forehead down to chin. There’s an aggressive, tense look as if he was suddenly interrupted within his sanctuary preparing for the ritual.

Food Prep. An enjoyable shoot because after you’re finished you get to eat it. I wanted to create a striking image focusing strictly on the food and a particular message. And the message? Polluting our planet, polluting our food. We live off the resources this planet provides us, and by wrapping a plastic holder for a six-pack can of Dale’s Pale Ale around the salmon’s head while floating over a white ceramic plate, represents the sense of fragility yet power which our food is. This image is a composite: one image exposed for the plate, the other for the salmon which was hung with 15lbs fishing line cleaned up in PS5.